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Seeing John Cassavetes

July 2, 2013

In John Cassavetes’s 1974 drama “A Woman Under the Influence” (which I discuss in this clip), the influence that Mabel Longhetti (played by Cassavetes’s wife, Gena Rowlands) is under is that of her husband, Nick Longhetti (Peter Falk), and it’s even more insidiously mind-bending and identity-warping than the alcohol that’s consumed so profligately in the course of the action. The type of masculine brutality that Nick displays is no exception in the course of Cassavetes’s career (which will be the subject of a great retrospective at BAM Cinématek, starting July 6th) but, rather, one of the filmmaker’s lifelong obsessions. In his penultimate film, “Love Streams,” from 1984, Cassavetes plays a writer who tells his young son, ” I don’t like men … they’re kind of boring. When you’re fourteen, I think you ought to hitchhike across the country, go into a truckstop, stop there, have a cup of coffee, and see what men are really like. Men. Not these guys out here with the suits and the ties.” Nick isn’t a suit-and-tie guy; he works on a construction crew and brings the raw physicality of his job home with him.

But most of Cassavetes’s films are about the brute beneath the suit. Whether it’s “Faces“—the 1968 film that is more or less his “Portnoy’s Complaint,” a great liberation in style, subject, and tone—or “Husbands” or “Opening Night,” he’s filming the upwardly mobile children of immigrants, the rising suburban bourgeoisie whose high-strung striving comes with a hair-trigger aggression as well as a tightly restrained vitality.

Cassavetes, who was born in 1929, was almost forty when he found his style and, for the rest of his career (he died in 1989), he filmed a generation that was out of synch with its time, one that was being edged from the spotlight. He filmed people who drank, smoked, and gambled, who wore tuxedoes or gowns, who frequented night clubs and whose music was jazz and standards. Their shambling expressivity and daily theatricality bore the pinpoint ideal of a sharp-edged elegance, a sense of dressed-up style that, by the time he filmed it, was an icon of survival, even a mark of loss. The result is cinematic modernism at its most romantic.

Cassavetes’s world is vehemently anti-Freudian. He sought not the source an emotion but the exhilarating, harrowing, mixed-up fullness of the experience of the moment—and his characters flay themselves and each other to get at it. The cursed circle of male aggression and female turmoil (and, for Cassavetes, gender roles were always decisive) are part of the desperate love quest, the need to connect despite the constant chill of ultimate solitude.

Cassavetes is as much an innovator in the realm of performance as in that of images, which pull in a soul-baring intimacy as they strike a note of incommunicable absurdity. (He beats out Ingmar Bergman with the most intimate, tender, and agonized movie closeups.) That’s why even his most furious and tragically painful moments keep an element of comedy: he tends toward a cinema of the absurd. In the film that opens the series, “Opening Night,” he comes as close as he ever did to displaying his method. Cassavetes never filmed on a movie set or made an overtly reflexive film, but many of his movies are centered on artists and performers (in the 1963 drama “A Child Is Waiting,” Judy Garland plays a singer who has left the stage). “Opening Night,” from 1977, is a backstage drama starring Gena Rowlands as an actress under the influence of a role and a playwright, and shows how she turns a script and a situation into performance, into the public creation of a singular, extravagantly personal moment.

His movies are liberating and transformative for his actors. In “Husbands,” he more or less invented the enduring personae of Falk and Ben Gazzara. But his collaboration with Gena Rowlands was particularly decisive. In “A Woman Under the Influence,” Cassavetes looks at her with astonishment and adoration, with love and cruelty, and dramatizes his own regret, self-loathing, and infinite gratitude. Her performance, with its seemingly endless well of pain and endurance, is among the most moving and terrifying in all cinema.

P.S. Note, in this clip, the echo of a climactic line from Nicholas Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause”: “Stand up for me.”

P.P.S. The two unmissable films in the BAM series are the two that are toughest to get to see otherwise: “Minnie and Moskowitz,” from 1971, starring Rowlands and Seymour Cassel, and “Love Streams,” in which Cassavetes gives himself a terribly painful role beside Rowlands—they play brother and sister—and also gives himself one of the most poignant of onscreen farewells.